Word: ci
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Ryszard Kapuści...
Among the few journalists who had been witness to the vagaries of Haile Selassie's reign was Ryszard Kapuściński, 52. A widely traveled former correspondent for the Polish Press Agency, Kapuściński was evidently impressed by the family resemblance shared by absolute rulers, whether they reign in Addis Ababa, Moscow or Warsaw. In fact, the real subject of his ambiguous, compelling memoir is not Haile Selassie's primitive autocracy. It is modern totalitarianism reduced to its primordial elements...
...Emperor offers a trenchant portrait of a 1963 conference of African leaders in the Ethiopian capital. During a gargantuan banquet for more than 3,000 guests in the Emperor's palace, Kapuściński ventures outdoors to an area where dishwashers are throwing out leftovers from the banquet tables. A strange sound issues from the far side of the garbage dump. "I noticed that something was moving, shifting, murmuring, squishing, sighing, and smacking its lips . . . In the thick night, a crowd of barefoot beggars stood huddled together . . . I watched the crowd devour the scraps, bones, and fish...
...decade later, after a military coup had toppled Haile Selassie, Kapuściński made the last of his many trips to Addis Ababa. With the help of a former official, he set out on a series of surreptitious expeditions to uncover the deposed Emperor's courtiers and persuade them to tell him about Haile Selassie's way of life and mode of rule. They confided tales of unbounded slavishness, greed, corruption and palace intrigue...
Strangely, all Kapuściński's Ethiopian interlocutors speak in the same ironic voice; the reader will soon come to identify it as the author's own. Indeed, there are moments when Kapuściński's fugitive images of Haile Selassie seem to merge with his visions of Stalin and other Communist leaders who have inflamed the writer's political fantasies. Little wonder that when The Emperor was published in Poland in 1978, this story of an evil autocrat surrounded by craven functionaries was read as an allegory of Communist rule...